when you are a student yourself

a reprint from super8mama about why I haven't done my homework:

Your Deafening Applause

I had decided I was ready to start my public life again. To resume painstakingly writing daily posts only moderately interesting and falling ever-short of clever. And then it happened. I went to my first class of the semester - a continuation of last semester's English Instruction and Curriculum - when my professor announced that one of the requirements would be to keep a blog.

He then had to ask questions like, "do people know what a weblog is, commonly known as a blog?" He gave a power point presentation on how to set one up. Immediately, I noticed my heals digging into the 70s faded linoleum floors. In fact, despite my desire to be a model student (give me that A), I refused to blog. Period. There, on blogspot, or here, livejournal. I can't tell you the name of my other blog because it has to be anonymous to the general public - in order to protect the students I am supposed to talk about. Which might be part of the reason I found it uninteresting and counter-productive in the first place. It runs counter to one of the main reasons that I blog. My audience.

There is something that happens when I blog. It's related to a phenomenon we talked about in my Adolescent Development course last week. It's called imaginary audience. When I was a pre-adolescent kid I was truly free. I played freely, dressed without care (purple Tough Skins with orange t-shirt was a favorite), showered infrequently, and had virtually no self-reflective awareness. Without being self-reflective, by definition, I couldn't be self-conscious. Then a cruel thing began to happen. I began to develop breasts. I discovered that I wasn't a boy. I guess I knew that I wasn't a boy. But as a young girl, who identified more with my father than my mother, in a childish fancy, I assumed I would grow up to be a man. So the breasts were hard to accept. (I remember wondering how low I could wear my unbuttoned my shirt, imitating Shaun Cassidy, without revealing the nubs of betrayal that kept spreading their mound across my chest.)

Along with secondary sexual characteristics adolescents gains something they like to talk about a lot in my education department: metacognition. This is simply, the ability to think about thinking. Meta-awareness is a side product of metacognition, the ability to think about oneself. And with that comes the inability to play freely, dress without care, or refuse showers without impunity. The awareness of the self and consequently others, becomes internalized as the Imaginary Audience. The voice of judgment internalized and ever present, watching every private act from using the toilet to singing along at full throttle to Jesus Christ Superstar (acting out all the parts and knowing all the words, for example, while convinced that Mike Nash and Rocket Defabaugh were watching and laughing through the living room window). My imaginary audience was perhaps more cruel than some and as a result I became tragically insecure, self-conscious, self-hating, and generally, weird.

Some say using the word queer to refer to oneself - if you are in fact a lesbian or gay man - is a reappropriation of a word originally used to hate on the non-straight folk. By taking control of the word, lesbian and gays diminish its power when yielded by the enemy. Likewise, I have undertaken a reappropriation of my disparaging imaginary audience, taking control of the concept in the context of blogging. I don't think Mike Nash spends his days reading my blog (my crush on him is long over - I confirmed this at my 20 year high school reunion last summer when I could complete a sentence in his presence without my skin flushing and my pupils dilating). However, I must confess even writing his name here brings about fantasies of him googling himself and finding this link, resulting in him reading my blog. Thus my imaginary audience becomes real.

When my strategic blogging - written for my friends, students who wonder what I think about teaching, or lurkers who are silently thinking, "god someone give her a syndicated column, or book contract" - is co-opted by the academic institution and served up as a tool for assessment, so that I can familiarize myself with the technology that kids are using, I guess, I return to my adolescence, strike that rebellious pose, and deny you throngs of readers my goodies.

I do apologize. Mike, you may resume reading now.